Monday night was a long night. One of the belties went into labor around supper time. Since she is an older cow we expected no difficulties. When she hadn't yet calved later in the evening, we thought it was time to intervene. After getting her where she couldn't move around, we did a pelvic exam and found she had a small upside down calf. We pulled the calf and it clearly had been dead for several days. Because it was quite small, we were concerned that there might be another. We probed as far as we could reach and found nothing else. She is a large cow and apparently we couldn't reach far enough. I went to check her later and she had delivered another dead calf. They were both bull calves and lacked any of the typical beltie hair that is present at birth. We believe that they had been deceased for quite some time before she aborted.

Everything else went well and we left for our visit with Jim on Thursday. We drove his new to him Dodge diesel. Due to some airline fare quirk, we found it would be $300 cheaper to fly back to Erie, Pennsylvania rather than Syracuse. Erie is about 4 hours along the way to Iowa. Mary found a hotel near the airport that had shuttle bus service. We stayed at the hotel and saved the parking which was considerable.

You can imagine our surprise when we pulled into the hotel and saw that the eating/ drinking establishment next door shared its name with my college roommate and lakeside neighbor. We went over and watched some NCAA basketball and got some photos for him.

We made it to Iowa in time to take Jim out for dinner. On both Saturday and Sunday, we watched him in his lacrosse games. Somewhere along the line, I came down with what must be strep throat or something similar. I am just getting over it now and Mary and Jim have it as well. Apparently lots of folks around home have it. I'm glad to be getting rid of it. Every time I go to Iowa, I am impressed with how industrious the college students are. It would take a lot to convince me that their farm background hasn't been a real positive force in their lives.

With Spring, we have had lots of people calling inquiring about cattle. We are lining up farm visits for prospective cattle buyers. I firmly believe that if you are interested in our cattle that it is well worth your while to drove here and see our animals. I don't want to sell animals to anonymous buyers. I feel that it is important to know that the buyers can care for the cattle.

It has been damp and 40ish since we returned. Starting tomorrow, it is supposed to be in the 70's and sunny though the weekend. I checked my peas today and saw nothing. Maybe the upcoming warm weather will get them out of the ground. I am also about ready to plant some onion sets.

I have also arranged to buy two feeder pigs. We have an ideal location to raise them and it will be interesting. I'll bring them home in a few weeks when we can depend on the weather.

It is also time to start preparing our planting and tillage equipment. It won't be long before we are out on the land. The cattle have access to a small winter pasture and they already are finding some new grazing. This is the beginning of our busy season. We also expect several of the lowlines to begin calving. We hope for eighteen more calves this year.

As part of her semester in France and tour of contiguous Europe, Eileen is off to Sardinia for Easter. It is amazing how places you can fly cheaply to around Europe on Ryanair which is an Irish absolutely no frills airline.

I spoke to her today and mentioned that I had read about an underwater volcano between Sardinia and Italy, Mount Marsili. It is apparently poised to have an underwater Mount St. Helen's type eruption. This could lead to a massive tsunami in that area. I recommended that she be alert. Sometimes, you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hopefully the volcano will remain dormant and she'll have a great weekend.

We picked up Mary at the airport early Monday morning. She had a great ski trip to Utah. The combination of a two hour time change going east in conjunction with the arrival of Daylight Savings Time gave her some jet lag.

We have had an amazing weather week. Every day has been blue sky and warm always at least mid fifties and a couple approaching seventy. With Jim's help, we got a real head start on spring work. We were able to clear a hedgerow between two pastures giving us a great spot for the cattle to get shade. All we did was clear the low brush leaving the trees etc. We also found an old abandoned barbed wire fence. Obviously our pasture was pasture once before. It is important not to have an old fence where the cattle are since they could easily get tangled or cut.

No new calves this week. The ones we have are doing very well. The red belties have been moved in with some black belties. They certainly are eye catchers.

We planted some garden peas today. I had always heard that it will bring good luck to plant them on St. Patrick's Day. I thought it was a little wet then but the conditions appeared perfect today. I have a friend who planted some on St. Patrick's Day a few years ago. He says that they really did bring him luck. They didn't come up and he thought that it was lucky since he doesn't like peas.

Things are pretty quiet at the diner. The big topic at the moment is the NCAA basketball. The marina restaurant has made it through their first winter and it looks like they will have a busy spring.

The ice went bout on the lake this week. The paper says that we had the driest winter ever. So I guess that explains how a few warm days did in the mud season at least for the moment.

Tonight, Mary and I went to a neighboring Fire Department Awards Banquet. It is always a pleasure to share this dinners and recognize the good works of our neighbors.

Jim goes back to school tomorrow by plane. When he was about eight years old, he always spoke about getting a Dodge, diesel engine , extended cab pick up. This week he got one. A 2001 just exactly like he always wanted. Mary and I are going to drive it to Iowa at the end of this week. He has three lacrosse home games next weekend that we look forward to watching. Then we will fly home. He'll have the truck at school for a month or so and then he'll be home.

He is very excited to have made it into the second round of interviews for a internship this summer with a major farm equipment manufacturer. They have sent him technical questions such as what would you do if this part failed etc. He has to get them the answers and they use them in their final evaluation.

Eileen is continuing to do well in France when she is in France. She has also been to Spain and Italy. She will also get to Tunisia, Ireland and Greece before returning home. In my junior year of college, I did get to see an away basketball game in Canton, New York.

We had a busy week. On Tuesday, we went downstate to pick up two new belted galloway heifers. These are red with a white stripe. We plan on breeding them with red Lowline semen from a bull named Bluey. Hopefully, if the genetics work as expected, we will have red belted lowlines in a year or so.

Speaking of pregnant, the vet came Friday and confirmed that all of our Lowline brood cows are pregnant. We expect calves to start around April 1 and continue throughout the spring and summer. A lot of farms like to calve all at once. In our business, I think it is better to calve over several months to spread out the ages of the animals as they mature. We are still waiting for the last two beltie cows to calve.

Also, on Friday we tagged and tattooed the four beltie calves. The tattoo paste is green. Needless to say, no matter how you grab them, the calves wriggle and squirm. They wound up with pretty visible traces of green here and there. They are ready for St. Patrick's Day.

Jim,arrived on schedule and tonight we will pick up Mary at the airport. Yesterday and today are rainy, raw and windy. You may be familiar with the expression that it takes a good spring rain to dry things up. This seems counter intuitive., However, it really works. The force of the rain tends to tighten up the ground which has been loosened by freeezing. Once, it is tight and the sun and wind come, it will begin to dry up. The forecast for the coming week is sunny and dry with temperatures in the fifties. That would be ten or more degrees above average.

It doesn't seem possible but we are only five or six weeks from beginning field work.

We did have a reasonably "big snow." About eighteen inches total of a very heavy wet snow. I spent the better part of a day opening up the road and areas around the barn. It's a good thing that I started while it was still falling because I wouldn't have been able to move it all in one push. Even six inches at a time was plenty for the tractor.

The calf that wouldn't suck must have decided that she really would prefer mother's milk to calf replacer. One evening when I went to do chores so was there sucking away and hasn't stopped since.

We had another beltie calf late yesterday afternoon. The mother wasn't disposed to let us get close enough to determine the sex. The calf immediately bonded and was nursing normally.

I was up very early this morning to take Mary to the airport. She is going skiing along with some other friends from our area. Jim will be home late Friday night for a week. Eileen is still in France. Both hope to hear soon about summer internships.

The last few days have been ideal for maple syrup production. Clear blue skies with nights below freezing and days around 40.